After reading the changelog, it seems pipewire-media-session is out and wireplumber is the new hotness. Ran a new DU, installed wireplumber, rebooted, configured sound device settings and sound is now working again. Using external DAC via optical cable and it's running 192 KHz just fine.
Snipped the relevant changelog entries:
pipewire (0.3.39-1) unstable; urgency=medium
* Don't build the pipewire-media-session binary package anymore,
media-session has moved to a separate module to accelerate its
deprecation in favour of WirePlumber.
* Change priority order between pipewire-media-session and wireplumber,
WirePlumber is now the recommended session manager.
$ pactl info | grep "Server Name"
Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.39)